I saved these photos but have no memory of where they were from. I practiced high jump in this room and played cards every morning before 5th grade. The school system offices were above the lobby.
Fifteen years since my friend and I asked seven members of congress about reforming the electoral college and were laughed off. Glad we asked that question, not glad Obama didn't push for real structural reform with his mandate.
I am a reformer. As we learn, we should continuously reexamine and rethink what we know and what we should do, based on the lessons of the past. When those processes break down, the pressures on the status quo end up being expressed unhealthily, and the status quo is often preserved unhealthily.
I'm not sure where that leaves me. There don't seem to be reform movements with potency, and the movements with potency seem more bent on destruction, which will cause harm and may spiral. On the other hand, maintaining what is with only minor changes, uncritically, on the theory that "we're the best you got," is also a long-term losing play.
We're not playing by the same rules anymore. Economic power, cultural power, people power, and political power are distributed unevenly and thus those with real, hard power don't appreciate their power, and think of themselves as victims or powerless, required to strike with hard force. We spend more time seeking and punishing heretics than winning converts.
We are mistaking how we see the world with how everyone should see the world - confusing attacks against a universal as attacks against our particular. We all seem to be supporting more and more state power, so long as it enables our causes and concerns - or supporting oligarchic power in opposition to the state. Neither is healthy.
In this climate, nuance and accuracy loses. Thoughtfulness loses. People in impossible situations get caught in a crossfire because that's just how it is, and those who seek to follow ethical and moral guidance are - slowly - punished when no one actually steps up to enforce guidance on those who seek infamy and harm as part of seeking their own success.
The body politic is sclerotic, and I don't know where to find the pacemaker.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.
Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.
When you think of the sheer vindictiveness of what happened to Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, it takes your breath away. On the very night of his greatest career triumph, a reporter dug up his old tweets (composed when he was a young teenager), reported on the most offensive insults, and immediately and irrevocably transformed his online legacy. Now he’s not just “Kyler Murray, gifted quarterback and humble Heisman winner,” but also the man who was forced to apologize for his alleged homophobia. And for what purpose? Which cause did the reporter advance? Where was the cultural gain in Murray’s pain?
It is hard to imagine standing in the shoes of Wisconsin’s West High School security guard Marlon Anderson. An African American father of four, he generally had positive relationships with the kids at his school. But one day a student, also African American, got teed off at him and called him a bunch of names including the n-word. Anderson retorted “Don’t call me [that word]” and used the word himself. As a result, he was fired last Wednesday pursuant to the school’s zero-tolerance policy.
Anderson, who is diabetic, not only faced lost wages, but also faced losing his family health insurance. He posted on Facebook: “The reality is that I did not just [lose] wages but also benefits. Most importantly we will soon be without health insurance.”
Anderson tried to get his job back but was told by the principal that under the school’s zero-tolerance policy for racial slurs “context or circumstances” don’t matter.
In March 2016, I published America is on a political path to violence and the events of this month have reminded me of all of the warning signs we already had, tracked here. Now we have a definitive timeline of the violence at the capitol, dedicated to stopping the legal counting of legal votes, premised on lies.
I mourn that we're still on this political path. The task of our leaders should be to stop it.
Since becoming one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors, Ghafari has survived multiple assassination attempts, including one in March, when gunmen sprayed her Toyota compact with bullets in Kabul, missing her fiance’s head by inches. After months of ignored requests, an armored vehicle was provided by the cash-strapped government. “If the Taliban get the chance, definitely they will kill me,” she says. “I’m on their blacklist.”
Slight and poised, with a midnight-blue headscarf and oversize glasses, Ghafari is just 27 years old. She is a bold testament to how far Afghan women have come since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the extremist Taliban regime. As a child, she was forced to attend a secret school for girls just to get an education. In the post-Taliban era she has thrived, earning a university degree in economics and launching a U.S.-funded radio station in Wardak aimed at women. In 2018, President Ashraf Ghani chose her over 137 other candidates — all of them male — to be mayor of Maidan Shar, the seat of a strategically important province bordering Kabul where the Taliban enjoy support. “All I had was my talent and my education,” says Ghafari. “Nothing else.”
Even as the votes continued to be counted in the early hours of Nov. 4, one thing became obvious before dawn: Joe Biden was going to be the next president of the United States. Though networks were extremely slow to acknowledge Biden’s wins across Rust Belt states, every model showed that Biden was going to win decisively in Minnesota and Michigan. Though Donald Trump had a large early lead among votes counted in Pennsylvania, it was easy to see from the make up of those votes that this was going to change. The closest of these swing states, Wisconsin, had already been called by the Associated Press. While it would take all the way until Saturday before networks made the final call, really the only thing in doubt by that point was the exact size of Biden’s victory.
But well before the final calls were made, at 2 A.M. on Nov. 4, Donald Trump had already made it clear where he was going. Trump appeared before the nation and said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment for our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”
Since Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting a mistake, but only responds to errors by doubling down, everything that happened after that might have been predicted. Even so, the catalog of actions Trump took in an effort to subvert democracy is astounding.
The Braves of Milwaukee took the bait, which meant that Henry Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was headed back to the South. I’m going to call him Henry in this column because that was the name he preferred, as opposed to “Hank,” a nickname attached to him by a PR man who thought White fans might find it friendlier. A giant on and off the field, Aaron died on Friday, a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday.
How did he feel about the move? As you might expect: “I have lived in the South, and I don’t want to live there again,” Aaron said in anticipation of the Braves’ 1966 debut in Atlanta.
In 2020, if Trump had flipped 10,342 votes in Wisconsin, 5,890 votes in Georgia, and 5,229 votes in Arizona, he would have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote by 7.01 million votes.
In 2016, if Clinton had flipped 5,352 votes in Michigan, 11,089 votes in Wisconsin, and 23,383 in Pennsylvania, she would have won the electoral college while winning the popular vote by 2.95 million votes.
